Hottentot Venus

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  The massacre was never punished. The Hottentots, or “stutterers” as we were called by whites because of the sound of our language, were fair game for both the English and the Dutch. We were no good as slaves. We refused to work in the mines. We would not work the land. We would not live in stone houses. Then there was our incomprehensible language, which resembled no other and was so filled with clicks and clacks it was impossible to speak. The Boers called it “Hottentot,” and not a language at all but the gobbling of a turkey. We, in turn, hated the Dutch language of grunts and gurgles, but at least we could speak it. It was their language which should have been called “Hottentot.” But as always, the white man won. I often wondered about that.

  We had names for everything, every thought, every state of mind, every month and season, every object, the sun, the stars, the planets, yet we had not named anything for them. They used not one word, not one adjective of ours, even to describe things they had no words for themselves. I wondered how was it that they got to name everything, and we nothing. In their frenzy to do this, they would take all the children of six or seven and round them up into groups and send them to schools where the teachers were white men who doubled as priests and medicine men. We the Khoekhoe had never had much use for priests or medicine men. We didn’t believe in religion and worshiped nothing except existence itself. That seemed to upset the white men at the school more than anything. We considered Jesus just another shepherd. Like us. Like our ancestor Tsuni//Goam, whom we called “Wounded Knee.” Nevertheless they prevailed.

  I was now a complete orphan. My aunt sold me to a Wesleyan missionary, the Reverend Cecil Freehouseland. The reverend was a tall, drawn, dark man full of passages from the Bible, which he could quote for days on end without ever repeating himself. He was neither young (for that wouldn’t have been dignified) nor old (for that would have implied that he was mortal). No, he was of that indeterminate age the Dutch called the full force of his faculties and the English called the prime of life. He had a short black beard, bushy black eyebrows and piercing blue eyes that were to me the same color as heaven itself. He was strong, barrel-chested and wide-shouldered, and he often worked in the fields of the mission, his torso bare, wearing only cotton leggings. His breast and arms sprouted a mysterious black pelt like an ape and there were tufts in his ears and nostrils. He was a man of few words and many parables and I fell in love with him with all my nine-year-old heart. I loved him exceedingly. I watched every movement, every glance, every gesture and tried to anticipate his every desire. I was always ready when he wanted me and endeavored to convince him by every action, every glance that my only goal was to serve him as a daughter and a slave. I have since thought that he must have been a serious, wonderful man. His actions, his smile, his projects, his generosity corresponded very well with such a character.

  Every day, at the mission, the reverend would read from the Bible to us children. He changed our Khoekhoe names to English or Dutch; Ssehura became Saartjie, which was “little Sarah” in Dutch. When I first saw him read, I was never so surprised in my life as when I saw the book talk back to him, for I believed it did as I watched his eyes scan the book and then his lips move in answer. I wished it would do the same with me. As soon as the Reverend Freehouseland had finished reading, I followed him to the place where he put the book, and when nobody was looking, I opened it and put my ear down close upon it, in the hope that it would say something to me. But I was heartbrokenly disappointed when I found it would not speak to me, and the thought immediately came to me that the book wouldn’t speak to me because I was black.

  Stubbornly I listened and listened, day after day, finally convinced was I that books in general and the Bible in particular wouldn’t talk to black folks.

  The Reverend Freehouseland would often talk about his “contract” with God and how sacred it was. How as a young man he had dedicated his life to saving heathens and spreading the word of God. At first, he had chosen China and had begun to study the language, which, he claimed, resembled Hottentot a little, but was a lot more simple. Then, in a sudden illumination, his contract with God had come to him. It was to be black Africa, austral Africa, the Cape of Good Hope, the most diminutive of God’s provinces where the most destitute and wretched of God’s children lived in sin . . . The Hottentots. This contract was sacred. The most sacred act of his life. All contracts were sacred, a sworn vow to be kept under all circumstances. They represented one’s given word, which was the very essence of Englishness and English faith. The word of a gentleman. And the word of Christ. A renegade was a traitor not only to himself but also to everything his soul stood for if he broke his word. Debt was the same. A debt was to be honored. If it was impossible to pay it, you might even have to sacrifice your life to save your honor. He asked if I understood. I told him that I did. It was like a warrior’s honor. Death was preferable to want of courage.

  —I deem you to be an honorable girl, one on whom I can depend. One who knows the meaning of dignity. One day I’ll take you to Manchester in England where I was born, but you’ll have to stop thinking the Bible doesn’t talk to colored people.

  About a quarter of a mile from the mission stood a very fine kowkow tree, in the midst of a small wood. I never failed to go there once a day, sometimes twice a day, if I could get away. It was my greatest pleasure to sit under the shade of this kowkow tree and pour out my heart to it when I was unhappy. I would go and sit there and talk to the tree. I’d tell it my sorrows, as if it were a friend. I couldn’t understand why, if you could talk to a cross made of dead wood, you couldn’t talk to a tree of wood which was alive. In those days, I was a quiet, sulky girl who repented at five o’clock each morning my vanity, my selfishness, my stubbornness, my pride, my vindictiveness, my envy of others, all sins. The Khoekhoe had a very strict code of behavior and a code of honor that was relentless. To this I added the admonishments of the Wesleyan mission with all its Thou Shalt Nots. When this burden seemed to be unbearable, I would go and talk to my tree. I found more comfort there than in the mission’s chapel because, as I saw it, the tree was a cross. I don’t know even now if I truly believe that the tree was Christ. All I know is that whenever I was treated with ridicule and contempt, found myself unbearably ugly or alone, I would go to the tree and the tree would not only listen to me, it would talk back to me.

  The Reverend Freehouseland died suddenly of the cholera. On his deathbed he told me that he hoped one day I would consent to talk to a book, especially the Bible, and that I was hereby free, and no longer a slave, that he always prayed for me, his favorite, and that in his will he had left me ten pounds. My only friend, my love, my protector, had abandoned me, just as my mother and father had. Every place in the world was the same to me from then on. For a long time, I dreamed only of going to England, where I believed all men were like him. And above all places in England, I wanted to see Manchester, where he had been born and where his body was now buried.

  The Reverend Freehouseland’s family never awarded me my ten pounds. And for good measure they sent me back to my clan. I returned to find that two of my brothers had died, one from smallpox, the other in one of the never-ending raids of white settlers. Our clan had almost disappeared from the earth like the others. I began to believe the Hottentots were the most wretched beings on the earth.

  When I was freed by the Reverend Freehouseland, I was almost thirteen years old and approaching the age of marriage. My father’s sister, Auni, who, except for selling me to the reverend, had always treated me kindly, like one of her own children, changed completely towards me now that I had been sent back home. She turned harsh and rigid and inflexible, not to say cruel. She suddenly had all kinds of rules and restrictions, mysterious rituals and secret manipulations. She was determined to produce a bride. I was shocked at the malevolence and discontent this project evoked in her. Was it because the task was impossible? Was I as ugly as all that?

  Even so, the village judged me a marriageable and desirable virgin. I ha
d beautiful small hands and feet and a tight cap of black curls that glistened with cocoa butter. On my head I wore a headband of long, thick braids of elephant grass, coiffed in elaborate designs. I had wide horizontal eyes without a fold at the lid and a high round forehead which took up half my face and gave it its heart shape. My cheekbones were high and fierce, my eyebrows plucked into a black line. My broad, full mouth with its jutting bottom lip was almost round, like a split papaya, and made an O. My eyes were light brown with almost no white, which had a bluish tint. My nose was short, my neck slim and long. I had small narrow shoulders and pear-shaped breasts tattooed in indigo with dark areolae. My waist was the smallest of all the virgins of the village and its size accentuated my wide jutting buttocks and sumptuous, mountainous hips. My clan carefully cultivated my shape according to our traditions. Like my peers, my bottom parts were massaged with butter and secret swelling ointments until they sprang a foot from the curve of my spine. I was fed the peanut oils and corn porridge and honey that would add even more flesh to them and more pounds to my thighs above the knees. My shape became my reason for being and that of my guardian. My shape became me and I became my shape. From time immemorial, it had been so for Khoekhoe women.

  Some marriageable females could hardly stand or hold up their own weight. There was one maiden, Fulikiki, who had to be carried from place to place on a stool, her hind parts were so heavy. If she stood up, she toppled over backwards like a doll. Her brother would set her in place, her earlobes pierced with gold, a plate of honeycomb in front of her into which she sank her perfect white teeth, making the gold glitter. But the crowning glory of our beauty was our sex, now hidden under the elaborate beaded apron all maidens had to wear. My aunt began to cultivate its size and shape for it was the ultimate symbol of my femininity, my sexuality, my worth as a bride, much more so than my virginity. My aunt was charged with this treatment and she applied herself diligently. She knew it was my only chance in life: a husband.

  She herself carried me to the compound for young girls when my menses came, lugging me piggyback so that my feet would not touch the ground. She cooked the porridge and flower bulbs and honey to fatten my hind parts. She taught me the medicine I needed to know. She performed the numerous rituals that had to be performed daily. She heated the water for my daily bath because washing with cold water was taboo. She groomed my skin, my feet and hands, rubbing them with coconut butter and beef fat. She showed me how to weave aprons out of multicolored feathers, to make necklaces from crushed ostrich eggs. To tan the thongs of skins I wore around my ankles. I was an orphan, after all, with no mother to guide my steps forward towards marriage.

  She also occupied herself with the ways of Khoekhoe women who made their sex more attractive by artifice.

  Aunt Auni made two incisions on each side so that the flesh curved downwards and placed a small pebble within. As the stones stretched the delicate membranes, she would insert a larger, heavier pebble until the flesh had descended to the length she desired and found beautiful. She explained, but I already knew from my sisters, that for my future husband, the act of love was not only the penetration of my vagina but also the enfolding of his gland within those fleshy lips. This would augment the ultimate moments of his pleasure. For my husband, I could procure rapturous levels with this apron of pulsing flesh filled with racing blood, fluttering like the burning wings of a butterfly or the fiery folds of a medusa. Each month the pebble got heavier and my bride-price increased. My aunt beamed with satisfaction.

  It had been so through generations of Khoekhoe women, though no one knew how or why the apron had begun, not even the midwives, not even the rainmakers. Auni believed that there had been an ancient goddess so endowed and that my mother and her mother and her mother’s mother’s mother, nearly all the women in our clan, followed this custom. It went back to the beginning of time before the Flood when we lived in Namibia, the land of the People of the People. Then, we had lived along the coastline formed by soft warm currents which blew the waters of the sea northwards, creating a garden of rich underwater plants, providing food for the penguins, seals and sea lions that bred in the rocks and caves. Ever since the Flood we had lived here in ten clans of hunters and herders of cattle. Our chiefs were not born but elected, mostly for their ability to make rain. There was no central authority over the clans. There was no dictator, no hereditary prince, no king, no nobles. There was no word in Khoe for property or slave. The territory between the Orange River, which we called the Chamtoo, and the coastline from Namaqualand to the Umzimvubu River where it empties into the eastern Cape was ours until the Dutch came along and took it. We lost our grazing lands, our stock, our trade routes with the Bantu. We lost three wars, endured ten famines and four smallpox epidemics. We the hunters became the hunted, first as slaves, then for sport. We lost all idea of the past, even the names of our own rivers. And we clung to a few old customs so lost in time they couldn’t even be explained, like the apron.

  None of the Khoekhoe ever cultivated the soil. We wandered about from place to place with our herds of long-horned cattle and flocks of fat-tailed sheep. Our principal food was the milk of our cattle, drunk as a rule after being allowed to thicken. The milking was done by the women, while the general herding and pasturing of the cattle were in the hands of the men. In addition to milk, we ate wild fruits, berries and flower bulbs of various kinds, gathered by the women from trees and bushes or dug up out of the ground. We ate them either raw or baked or roasted. Meat was a luxury we obtained by hunting, never by killing cattle. In addition to game, all sorts of small animals and even insects were eaten in case of necessity. The domestic animals were never slaughtered, save on festive or ceremonial occasions, but any that died of disease or other natural causes were eaten with great joy. When hard pressed by hunger, we would eat almost anything that could be swallowed. For us, the ever-present need for grass and water for our herds and flocks compelled us to live and move in small, separated communities.

  Our land was exploited on equal terms by all the members of the tribe. It could under no circumstances become the property of one person, nor was it held to belong to the chief; and it was generally regarded as inalienable. The vendetta system was in force amongst us, and the chief of the tribe did not possess the power to prevent the members of two clans from carrying out blood vengeance on one another. The heads of the clans were often jealous of one another; there were constant rivalries and disputes, which sometimes flared up into open warfare. Time and again a powerful clan would go off on its own, asserting its independence of the others; and clan loyalty was always stronger than the tribe.

  Within the clan was the family, consisting of a man with his wife or wives and dependent children. All the tribes permitted second and third wives, although as a rule only the most powerful and wealthy men had more than one wife. In any case, the number of wives seldom exceeded two or three. The first wife was the chief wife, and she took precedence over the others.

  The camp was built in a vast circle, enclosed with a great fence of thorn. Within the fence and round the circumference were the huts of the people, each hut facing inwards to the center. Members of the same clan had their huts close together, and the tribal rank of a clan could be seen in its distance from the huts of the chief and clansmen. A great open space in the center served as a corral for the stock at night. Special enclosures were made for the calves and the lambs, but the cattle and sheep just lay in the open before their owner’s hut until they were driven out to graze in the morning.

  After my return to the clan, they called me wild because I roamed restlessly amongst the dunes and short grass which linked the land to the continent, dreaming of Manchester and the fortune that had been stolen from me. I would wade in the hollows between the flooded dunes in winter and spot the hippopotamus that roamed the lakes the floods made. We the Khoekhoe were nothing, I thought. Our ten clans were dispossessed, or enslaved; the young men no longer owned herds. My father was dead and my mother murdered, what
would my life be here? Where could I go? I wasn’t wild. I was desperate.

  It was a Khoesan custom that young people could choose to live with one another without a contract of marriage. The couple could at any time dissolve the union or sanctify it with the banns of matrimony. However, once the banns had been posted and approved by the elders, no other man could intrude on a husband’s rights by contract. This was a sacred obligation. The punishment for adultery was death. The guilty parties would be buried in the sand up to their neck with only the head visible. Both man and woman would be stoned to death. An adventure outside the trial marriage, however, carried no sanction or penalty. It simply meant the end of that couple’s union. I chose a drummer, Kx’au, a first cousin from my own clan, as a trial husband and for more than two years we lived together in his family’s village.

  Kx’au’s village was a long way from my clan’s encampments, nearer to the brick and wood town of Cape that had been built as a fort by the Afrikaners. His village was more dangerous than my village because white raiders from the Cape made yearly attacks on it. Moreover, there were rumors of a new war between the Boers and the English, who had taken the land the Boers had stolen from us. We heard of new inventions for warfare that the English had brought to bear: repeating rifles that spat lead like a fountain, the wide canoes with giant cannons that could bombard towns and villages from the sea, safe beyond the firepower of the attacked. Men spoke of fire bombs that could destroy a whole cultivated field, and finally of the Dutch Boers, who were being driven out of Orange into the hinterlands and towards what was left of our lands. But I never believed any of this had anything to do with us. The yellow-haired white men fought amongst themselves over lands which didn’t belong to them. So what? At least they left us in peace for a change, too busy to raid and murder and spread disease.